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Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

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Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#591

Post by int_19h »

acdha wrote: post #584
int_19h wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were high-end WinCE and Symbian devices with large displays and no physical keyboards (or sliders where keyboard doesn't encroach on screen size). To remind, first-gen iPhone was 3.5" @ 320x480 in 2007; for comparison, Dell Axim was 3.7" @ 480x640 in 2005, and by 2007 there were some WinMo handhelds with 480x800. The thing that really made iPhone different was capacitive touchscreen, and the OS designed around…

Also note “and a first-class web browser” in my compound statement. If you used devices of that era, the browsers sucked at handling most of the web. I knew people who had the previous generation devices (I’m excluding the PalmOS ones I owned since they required a stylus) but nobody used the mobile browser much because it was so unrewarding, and everyone I know replaced them with iPhones due to the web experience.

In 2007, the lack of Flash support alone would disqualify it from being "first class" IMO.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#592

Post by entropicdrifter »

r00fus wrote: post #538
jamestown44 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment I recently switched from iPhone (last 10 years?) to Android. It's been a little painful but: - nearly all apps support Android as well. The ones I used (navionics, banking apps, WhatsApp) you just log in on Android, no cost involved. - most Apple first party apps have a Google equivalent (google wallet, google keep notes, google messaging etc.) that is very similar - my AirPods work equally well with…

Fine - but that took Google billions and a decade of work to reach near-parity. A new entrant will not have any of that. Web apps can do much more than they could 10 or 15 years ago but still takes massive effort.

Sorry to be rude, but what are you smoking?

Google's been ahead of Apple on tons of core user-facing features since the start (widgets, backgrounds, folders). The two platforms have extremely slowly converged to near-total feature parity. The only "advantage" of Apple's total ecosystem lock-in is relative seamlessness due to the vertical integration between their various services.

The thing is, it's barely any harder to set up an equivalent Google/Android ecosystem and has been for well over a decade as well. The real issue on the Google side of things is the renaming/shifting of services. Messages -> Gmail Chat -> Talk -> Duo -> Messages, Google Play Music -> Youtube Music, etc.

The feature parity's been there

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#593

Post by entropicdrifter »

jychang wrote: post #387
brookst wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s splitting hairs. By that logic nobody ever wins when they defend a lawsuit, the plaintiffs just fail to prove their point and different plaintiffs and/or different evidence might prevail in the future.

Well, being dismissed "with prejudice" exists. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/with_prejudice

Yeah, but winning vs winning on all possible fronts is a meaningful distinction. Apple won, they just didn't win as much as possible.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#594

Post by enragedcacti »

DannyBee wrote: post #469
enragedcacti wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Apple case the judge defined the relevant market as "digital mobile gaming transactions" and that Apple is not legally a monopoly there in part because of competition from Google, Nintendo, and Stadia (lol). A suit from another company could result in a different market determination and a different outcome without being inconsistent with that ruling.

I'm very aware of the legal intricacies. As for whether someone else will win, maybe, maybe not. Look up res judicata. Keep in mind - the judge deciding the market is x will not affect whether it is considered the same set of facts . So if you filed a case with the same facts, or very similar facts, you wouldn't escape res judicata on the grounds that you think the market is different. You would have to come with a d…

Agreed entirely, though I don't think a different set of facts is a particularly hard hill to climb. Possibly as simple as "the plaintiff makes products that aren't games and/or Apple directly competes with the plaintiffs offerings" e.g. Hey or Spotify. Finding that plaintiff who also has a ton of money and has a controlling interest who is at least as hardheaded as Tim Sweeney is a whole different issue, especially since the Automattic guy is so busy right now.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#595

Post by acdha »

int_19h wrote: post #591
acdha wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note “and a first-class web browser” in my compound statement. If you used devices of that era, the browsers sucked at handling most of the web. I knew people who had the previous generation devices (I’m excluding the PalmOS ones I owned since they required a stylus) but nobody used the mobile browser much because it was so unrewarding, and everyone I know replaced them with iPhones due to the web experience.

In 2007, the lack of Flash support alone would disqualify it from being "first class" IMO.

Opinions varied widely on that - the Flash experience on mobile was horrible enough that it works equally well as an argument that “the web” and Flash were substantially not the same.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#596

Post by acdha »

eru wrote: post #587
acdha wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note the part after “and” - I wrote that as a compound sentence because I saw more people than I expected go from both earlier smartphones or PDAs because the iPhone gave them the web in a way that earlier devices just didn’t. None of my clients had seen much in the way of public mobile web (or WAP) adoption prior to that, but that changed surprisingly quickly when the iPhone launched.

Yes. Out of curiosity, what do you mean by your clients?

I worked with a number of organizations which built public web apps. Nobody really asked about support for mobile browsers before the iPhone - some people checked that, say, an order form was technically functional but the assumption was that if it was slow or hard to read that was more to be expected than something they were going to pay to improve.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#597

Post by int_19h »

acdha wrote: post #595
int_19h wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2007, the lack of Flash support alone would disqualify it from being "first class" IMO.

Opinions varied widely on that - the Flash experience on mobile was horrible enough that it works equally well as an argument that “the web” and Flash were substantially not the same.

It was definitely horrible, but given how pervasive Flash was on the web then, I think a more reasonable takeaway is to say that no mobile device had first-class browser support until HTML5 became prevalent. To me, "first class" implies "I can visit any popular website and expect it to work", which was decidedly not the case for iPhone at introduction.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#598

Post by rpdillon »

blangk wrote: post #274
rpdillon wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only dangerous if Google has better judgment than the end user. This may be the case for the majority of users, but there's a significant subset for whom it's not the case. It'd be nice if there were a way for the end user to nudge Google to step aside.

There is : the end user allows side loading from their preferred app, such as f-droid. Am I missing something?

Play Protect, mostly. It nags incessantly to be turned on all the time, even after I've made my intentions to sideline it clear.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#599

Post by [deleted] »

can16358p wrote: post #589
Aerroon wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I easily put a compiler on either platform? My understanding is that you can't, which makes both platforms kind of bad.

It depends on the intended use case: compiling source code isn't the intended use case of neither of those platforms. It doesn't make them "bad".

[deleted]

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#600

Post by Aerroon »

viraptor wrote: post #556
Aerroon wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I easily put a compiler on either platform? My understanding is that you can't, which makes both platforms kind of bad.

You can easily put compilers on Android. Put the whole system on it if you want https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula

Huh! I really was under the impression that you couldn't. It's been many years since I last checked though.

Thank you very much for correcting me!

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